This is the first of some (planned) occasional posts on writers’ cafes. Writers’ cafe has a personal meaning. It simply means that over some days I found the place quiet and agreeable enough that I got some writing done there, and nobody gave me dirty looks or threw me out to free up a table. Hassle-free, with drinkable coffee and nibbles. Cafe Boheme, on Old Compton Street in Soho, London, is one of those.

It opened in 1995, and I found it by chance when visiting London on business in the late 90s, a time when a good cup of coffee was a lot harder to find in London than it is now. Then, the coffee at Cafe Boheme was refreshing to a New Yorker suffering from the scarcity. Now, the Cafe Boheme coffee is … tolerable, I would say. A bit thin, perhaps. But likely the standard for coffee has risen a lot in London. Now, there’s a Caffè Nero or a Costa Coffee on every corner.

Intended ambience: 1950s Parisian bistro-brasserie, and Nick Jones—the restauranteur …

These are heady times for bowdlers and censors of all stripes. Not only is there a surge in demand by culture warriors on the far right and ultra-woke left to revise histories, lived experiences, and everyday language they deem unsavory or inconvenient, but there are great new tools to get the job done. This post looks at the market for ‘bowdler-tech’, a fast-growing specialization within the broader repression-tech industry.¹ Follow-on posts look at nifty gadgets for bowdlerizing at scales never seen before.

To ‘bowdlerize’ means to remove or alter parts of a text deemed too immoral, vulgar, irreverent, or politically inconvenient for ordinary folk to see. It takes but a small liberty to extend the term to other kinds of art. The word honors Thomas Bowdler², an English editor who published a “family-friendly” version of Shakespeare’s works, with all the bits his blue-stockinged sister thought too juicy removed.

The David affair

A conservative …

On December 26, 2022, Russian police stormed the apartment of nineteen-year-old University student Olesya Krivtsova, threatened her with a sledgehammer, then arrested her for terrorism. She’d been denounced to the FSB by fellow students and a vigilante troll. Her crime? An Instagram post questioning the war in Ukraine. But this isn’t a story about a teenager’s naive mistake; it’s a story about the courage to speak truth to power even in the face of its wrath, gently, and without rancor.

This post is essentially the journal I kept while following the story, which was reported in various news outlets and blogs over the months. I’ve listed the main sources at the end, especially for the pictures.

As I followed this story, I was struck by the recurring pattern of history: snitching and denunciation in a totalitarian police state; the pathos of a new generation, including University history students, blind to the lessons of the past, meekly buying into the …

AI’s can’t copyright their own work, nor can their human (ab)users, according to a recent ruling by the US Copyright Office (USCO). The ruling applies to both artwork and text. It expands on an earlier one that revoked a copyright registration granted to Kristina Kashtanova for her and Midjourney’s collab on a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn. For this posting, I asked two AIs for their opinions.

The ruling is interesting because the USCO is already receiving lots of applications for copyright on AI-generated works, just as online bookstores are seeing the start of a likely deluge of AI-generated books and comics. The ruling states that the human author can be granted copyright for the entire work, but the copyright only applies to the human contribution such as composition of elements, not to elements that are AI-generated.

According to established precedent and law, only a human can be an ‘author’. But it isn’t always clear where human …

Teachers can be exciting, frustrating, boring, and many other ‘ings’, as all students know. So can teaching, as all teachers know. Teachers are also chronically underpaid and overworked. In the West, we don’t often think of them as heroes. And they don’t often face a violent death for their work, as they do in Afghanistan. Yet even in the US, teaching is a profession that calls for courage.

Note! This posting contains reproductions of beautiful Islamic paintings of the Prophet Muhammed.

It can take courage to teach about air pressure and electromagnetism in California, as science teacher Greg Schiller discovered when he volunteered to help kids with their entries for a science contest. He was suspended when a school bureaucrat noticed that one of the kids’ projects was a tiny version of the marshmallow cannon President Obama praised at a White House science fair, and another used an electromagnetic coil to launch an object several … feet. They …

Artificial neural network techniques like stable diffusion and online tools like Stability.ai’s DreamStudio are fun to play with, but are there practical uses? Decorative ones are the first that spring to mind. And people have already come up with some cool decorative–not to mention commercial–ideas, like this voice-controlled service to create wallpaper on the fly: Shopify’s AI wallpaper.

Here’s my attempt at AI-generated gift-wrap, using only plain white paper and a monochrome laser printer.

The small paper is best for books, of course. The prompts I used to generate the wallpaper-style images have some connection to both the theme of the book and the tastes of the intended recipient.

Is it creative? Well, um … I did think up the prompts all by …

I’m not the first to play with ChatGPT, maybe not the millionth, judging by all the awe-struck articles and the red warnings: “We’re experiencing exceptionally high demand” and “Request timed out.” But I did want to see ChatGPT try its hand at space pirates.

And I wanted to see how good a student it could be. Here we go!

Gil: Tell me a story about a space pirate who unexpectedly encounters an alien spaceship.

As Captain Jack sailed through the vast expanse of space, he never expected to come across anything other than the usual asteroid fields and drifting debris. But as he rounded a cluster of dense celestial bodies, a strange shape caught his eye.

At first, he thought it was just a trick of the light, but as he drew closer, he realized it was an alien spaceship. Its sleek, curved lines and unfamiliar markings were unlike anything he had ever seen before.

Captain Jack’s pulse raced as he realized the potential of what he had stumbled upon. A …

Browsing the shelves of Foyles while in London this week, I was intrigued to see a couple of books by NYT bestselling author Andrew Shaffer: Hope Never Dies and Hope Rides Again. These political thrillers feature Barak Obama and Joe Biden as action heroes. Reviewers describe them as “escapist fantasy for liberals”, and “bromantic buddy-cop noir.” Prominently displayed cover-out, in the YA SFF section of Foyles. In London. Cool. I looked for a YA MAGA hat romance for balance, but didn’t find one. Probably sold out.

Now, Foyles is a fair sized bookshop (also an awesome one), but it’s hardly the Barnes & Nobel on Union Square. Shelf space is precious. So, how did these Obama Nation nostalgia pieces end up on this side of the pond? Could it be …

This pumpkin season, readers and writers can celebrate the abortion of an ill-conceived chimera: the attempted merger of publisher Penguin Random House—the largest trade publisher in the US—with Simon & Schuster, a smaller but formidable rival. The US Justice Department sued a year ago to block the merger, arguing that the creation of a single publisher that controls half the US market would be anti-competitive. It would reduce publishing options for writers, competition for their works, and the variety of books available to readers.

This Halloween, Judge Florence Pan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed, and issued an order that blocks the deal. Here’s what might have happened, had she not:

This would have given us a plumped-up leader of the remaining Big Four:

The CEO of Bertelsmann, the German media group that owns Penguin Random House, said “The merger will be good …

An article in the Advocate mentions an amusing skirmish in the TERF war embroiling author J.K. Rowling: a stand of Fantasy books in the Union Square Barnes & Nobel flagship store labeled ‘The Unproblematic Wizarding World’ in which the Harry Potter books are conspicuous for their absence.

My guess: it’s a gentle, mischievous poke by a staff member or three, well-meant and harmless. Might it even be bookish double entendre? After all, the same B&N store offers Harry Potter by the shelf-load; tables groan under the weight of those fat, magical tomes. And what should we infer from the absence of others, like The Wizard of Oz and Room on the Broom?

Twitter warriors on both sides wade in, of course, and howl for banning, blood, and vengeance.

What are B&N’s ‘unproblematic’ choices? Funny thing: it’s hard to find a book that isn’t problematic for someone. That shouldn’t surprise, in an era when Dr. Seuss is censored by the …

Short days—that’s what I wanted. The days in Jasper’s world should be an hour long. How is the topic of this post and the previous one. Why is another story. The previous post described the physics and writerly problems with a quickly-spinning planet. This one describes how Ard’s Girdle of The Gem Merchant’s Son and the godlands of the Clanmarks series came to be.

If the world can’t spin quickly, and ‘just magic’ is too facile, then I needed something to cast periodic shade—sunshades to cause eclipses. I’ll start with the effect I wanted, then work backwards to the cause. Here’s how I describe the effect in the Gem Merchant’s Son:

The day would be a scorcher, and the hourly eclipses welcome. …

At the eastern edge of the world, one of the twelve vast, invisible shield-plates of Ard’s Girdle, rising faster than the sun did, began to nibble into its lower rim. A minute later, the sunlight dimmed and the …

Short days–that’s what I wanted. Jasper’s world should have days about one hour long. How is the topic of this post and the next. Why is another story.

What’s hard about short days, you ask? The Gem Merchant’s Son is a fantasy. I could have said “let the days be one hour long” and be done with it. But I’ve never been a fan of ‘just magic’; I like there to be a system to it, even a science to it. Both The Gem Merchant’s Son and the Clanmarks series, which are set in the same world, are as much SF as F, and I like my SF hard as old cheese.

My first try: “Let Jasper’s world spin very fast.” Then the days would be short and consistent with the physics we know. But problems, problems.

The first problem: the Earth is not a solid ball; it is viscous, like plasticine. That’s more or less true for any planet. When it spins, it deforms, becomes flattened. Since Earth does spin once in 24 hours, its shape …